Central Telegraph Office, London, in 1900

There was nothing, exteriorly, to indicate that the lofty building facing the General Post Office in 1900 was the Central Telegraph Office, in effect, the earth's great Nerve Centre.

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The Foreign Cable-room was in direct communication with all the capitals of Europe, and indirectly with those of every country in the world where the telegraph ran, which meant that it had "running powers" over 170,000 miles of submarine cables that cost £50,000,000 to construct.

On the upper floor was the great T-shaped Instrument-room, where thousands of instruments were incessantly clicking, worked by two thousand operators, of whom a large proportion were women.

Most impressive it was to watch the duplicating machines, each one sending or receiving messages at rates of anything up to four hundred words a minute.

These instruments were for the dispatch of messages that, word by word, had to be sent to two or more places, and the multitude of such messages was astonishing.

Stock Exchange quotations, racing, cricket, all news handled by the great agencies, supplying the eager newspapers in every quarter of the kingdom; in fact, practically everything requiring to be duplicated was forwarded to its destination through the medium of these wonderful Wheatstone automatic machines.

The Telegraph Department of the General Post Office was full of wonders.

The visitor could see the Delany Multiplex sending off six or eight messages over one wire, at what appeared to be - but by some ultra-minute fraction of a second was really not - the same time; and was shown all sorts of "impossible" things being done as though they were not matters of marvels, but everyday trifles.

There was a room for short suburban messages, mostly in charge of women, where there were no multiplexes or automatics, and where no great speed of fingers, or straining of the operator's brain was required.

In a third room were the mouths of the pneumatic tubes that ran under the thoroughfares of the City and the West Central district, and delivered to the branch offices the dispatches as put in, saving the time of passing the words over the wire.

In the open courts in the centre of the building were the engine-rooms - whose tall chimney-shaft was not discernible from the street - and the great battery-rooms deep down in the basement; but neither of these departments was shown to visitors.

The statistics of the Telegraph Department at the turn of the twentieth century were bewildering.

In 1898-9 over 87,000,000 telegrams were dispatched in the United Kingdom; but the telephone messages reached the astounding total of nearly 640,000,000, ie there were seven and a half times more telephone-calls than "wires" sent.

Next: Locomotive London in 1900: The Fire Brigade

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